By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

If one has the opportunity to deal with two or more widely differentcultures and languages on a more than superficial level, there is a goodchance that one comes across systematically different patterns in cultureand language that seem to correspond to each other. The enterprise to pindown such correspondences between language and culture scientifically, thatis, beyond mere impressions and intuitions, has been known under the label'linguistic relativity'. The author of the volume under review firmlyplaces herself in this tradition of linguistic relativity when she comparesthe concept of agency and its realization in Japanese and English languageand thought.

It was already pointed out by Ikegami Yoshihiko (1991) and others thatEnglish seems to emphasize agency while Japanese suppresses or backgroundsit. Yamamoto builds on this observation and can thus be seen in a line ofresearch descending from Ikegami, a scholar who has been extremelyinfluential within Japan. At the same time the book is a directcontinuation of her previous book that appeared in the same series, on''Animacy and Reference'' (Yamamoto 1999). In a preview of my evaluation, Iwould say that, although the concrete linguistic analysis is not alwaysconvincing, the author is successful overall in raising awareness aboutsystematically differing patterns of expression through which agency isobfuscated in Japanese, while it is highlighted in English. Concerning theconnection to culture, or habitual thought, however, the book is lesspersuasive, simply because of the failure to provide any hard evidence(data) that would support this connection.

SUMMARY

The rather slim volume (130 pages plus notes, references and an index)consists of five chapters. After a 10-pages introduction, chapter 2 (11-37)discusses the concept of agency in some detail. It starts out with thetreatment of the concept in philosophy, going back to Aristotle, and goeson to discuss the relationship of agency with related concepts such asintentionality, awareness of action responsibility, causation, and animacy.Yamamoto acknowledges the relevance of all these notions for the concept ofagency, but ultimately sees intentionality at its core, and animacy asinseparable from it, since ''[o]nly animate beings can be agents in a normalsense'' (29).

Chapter 2 also introduces the concept of ''mind-style'' which consists of the''preoccupations, prejudices, perspectives and values which may bias anindividual's 'world-view''' (19). ''Mind-style'' and ''world-view'' are the key terms in Yamamoto's concept oflinguistic relativity. Language patterns reflect mind-styles, and may alsoinfluence mind-styles in a mutual relationship. Mind-style, therefore, asYamamoto uses it, seems to refer less saliently to the individual thancollectively to a language or culture (in comparison) as a whole.

Chapter 3 (39-69), the core of the book, deals with the linguistictreatment of agency. Section 3.2 discusses agency in linguistic analysis,referring to Fillmore, Cruse, and other scholars who have been concernedwith semantic roles and related notions, before settling on Dik's (1989)Functional Grammar approach to the concept of ''agent''. Section 3.3 presentsdata on agents in Japanese texts and their English translations and viceversa. The data show that Japanese has an overwhelmingly strong tendencytowards either ellipsis of the agent or choosing verbal expressions that donot require an agent. According to the author, it can thus be said that incontrast to English, which has an ''actor-action pattern'' (65), Japanesebackgrounds actors into 'nothingness' and prefers 'impersonal' expressionof events (68).

Chapter 4 (71-117) tries to forge links between the linguistic data and''mind-styles'' or ''world-views''. In the first part of the chapter, Yamamotointroduces the cognitive linguistic concepts of ''figure'' and ''ground'' andargues that in Japanese not only agents tend to be obfuscated but evenfigures in general, which is ''[a]n ultimate demonstration of impersonalityin the Japanese language'' (76). It is then argued that in Japanese, ifagents are not elided altogether, 'de-agentivisation' takes place through'positionalisation' of persons, or the replacement of individual agency bygroup or collective agency (78-90). In section 4.3., the author revisitslinguistic relativity, boldly stating her support for Whorfian linguisticrelativism, in contrast to many modern linguists who, while pursuing arelativist research agenda as well, tend to distance themselves fromlinguistic-cultural relativism in its earlier forms. Finally, in section4.4., the author makes the connection between language, mind-styles andcultural norms, arguing that the linguistic obfuscation of agent correlatesto impersonalisation, de-agentivisation and dehumanisation of human agentsin Japanese society and to collectivism, as opposed to individualism inEnglish-speaking societies.

Chapter 5 (119-130) is devoted to issues that are seen as peripheral to thediscussion of the present book, namely agency and rhetorical style inJapanese and English literary works, and impersonality in languages otherthan English and Japanese, hinting at the possibility of future typologicalresearch.

EVALUATION

This book refers not only to linguistics but also to philosophy andliterary studies. From my limited view as a linguist, it is in somerespects very attractive and in other respects very weak. To start out withthe positive features, I found this book always interesting to read, due tothe author's wit and entertaining style of writing, which is trulyadmirable. The discussion of the concept of agency in chapters 2 and 3 iscomprehensive and useful. It is somewhat regrettable that the authorintroduces and discusses various concepts of agency, but in the end letsthem stand as they are without a new synthesis, but the review of existingconcepts is of undeniable value. The ensuing exposition of the data inchapters 3 and 4 is, to the reviewer's knowledge, more thorough thananything written on the topic before. The author shows in detail how agentsare backgrounded in Japanese and highlighted in English. However, it shouldbe critically remarked here that the same (rather limited amount of) datawere already presented in Yamamoto's earlier book in the same series(Yamamoto 1999: 164f), and that data-wise this book offers nothing new; thefocus of discussion has simply shifted from animacy and reference toagency. The link between backgrounding agency in language and in society,as presented in chapter 4, may be intuitively plausible to anyone familiarwith Japanese culture, but, as mentioned briefly above, it is establishedexclusively on the intuitions of the author about Japanese society andthought, and some general books on it, and is not supported by any data.

Here we come to the critical points. In the new wave of researchestablishing links between language and thought (e.g. Lucy 1992, Levinson2003, Gentner & Goldin-Meadow 2003), the general consensus is thatdifferent linguistic structures as such are no conclusive evidence forlinguistic relativity. One needs corresponding data from non-linguisticexperiments that establish correspondences between language and generalcognition. As a result, most contemporary research on linguistic relativityis being carried out within the frameworks of, or with the methods of,psycholinguistics and anthropology. Yamamoto, in contrast, relies solely onlanguage data. Her intuitive observations on the link of linguisticstructures to 'mind-styles' are certainly interesting to read, and may havetheir own value as ideas, but from a scientific point of view they areinconclusive.

Another serious problem lies with the linguistic analysis. Can ellipsis ofarguments (pro-drop), which is common in Japanese, be really equated with'impersonalisation' or even 'nothingness'? Certainly, this is a possibleconclusion, but it seems to me that the author has jumped to thisconclusion too readily without seriously considering alternatives. Withinthe discourse grammar of a language, ellipsis must be primarily seen aspart of the referent identification and reference-tracking system. This isan important aspect of ellipsis not taken into account at all by Yamamoto.In her book, sentences from coherent texts are presented in isolation asexamples of 'impersonality' and 'nothingness' although it is preciselytheir position in discourse and context that prompts the ellipsis. Usually,pro-drop languages dispose of various devices to indicate referents,saliently including agents and other first arguments. In an excellent studyon the topic by Nariyama (2003), the author shows the system ofpredicate-marking morphemic and syntactic devices that are employed inJapanese, including ellipsis as a meaningful part of the system, and not as'nothingness'. Also, consider the following example of 'impersonalisation'from Yamamoto (61):

The point for Yamamoto is that while the English sentence (from an AgathaChristie novel) has the personal pronoun you, the Japanese translation hasnothing in its place, and thus is ''impersonal'' and ''somewhat incomplete''.However, to my mind, the Japanese sentence is not impersonal at all. Whileit does not contain a pronoun, the honorific marking on the verb (one ofthe devices pointed out by Nariyama) very directly indicates theinterlocutor as the referent (and agent). This makes the sentence in facthighly personal.

Another very interesting point made by Nariyama is that the wholereference-tracking system in Japanese is saliently centered on theinterlocutors, especially the speaker. In this sense, far from beingimpersonal or event/situation-centered, ''the organization of Japanesesentences has a propensity to be egocentric and anthropocentric'' (Nariyama2003: 264).

Different languages have different systems of segmenting events and markingreferents. Are these all due to different mind-sets and world-views? Isuppose it is easier to jump to this conclusion if only two languages suchas English and Japanese are compared, which then appear as two polaropposites, than if many languages are taken into account. For example, somelanguages in West Africa (and presumably others elsewhere as well) tend tosplit up events into more sub-events than English, and at the same timerequire obligatory subject pronoun clitics for each verb. Also, they maynot allow the frequent subject ellipsis in complex sentences that Englishhas (e.g. they may have something like 'I went (to) I buy food' instead of'I went to buy food'). That is, in the equivalent a sentence where youmight find one or two agentive subject pronouns in English, and possiblynone in Japanese, you might find three or four in that language. Does thatmean that speakers of such languages have a super-agentive world-view?

In conclusion, I believe that ellipsis should either be analyzed morecarefully or omitted entirely from the discussion of agentivity andimpersonality. This leaves us with those cases where Japanese choosesdifferent, intransitive expressions from English, and those are stillinteresting enough. One of the merits of Yamamoto's book lies in a thoroughdiscussion of such cases, but I feel that this merit ends up beingdiminished by the lack of a clear distinction between such cases and casesof ellipsis.

One more point where I found that Yamamoto unfortunately undermines thethrust of her own argument is the fact that the author initially includedEnglish scientific texts in her study but later decided to exclude them asit turned out that they abounded in agentless passives (59). From a humanpoint of view, it is understandable if the author did not want to includedata that would undermine her clear-cut picture of agent-oriented Englishvs. event-oriented Japanese. However, it seems to me that an opportunitywas missed to point out that Japanese and English are possibly notmonolithic blocks but that various modes of discourse exist and can beemployed by speakers for different purposes. Overall, Yamamoto was perhapstoo eager to present a strong contrast between the two languages andcultures while in fact a more balanced approach would have made theimpression of higher credibility. It should also not go unnoticed thatwhile Japanese language and culture may indeed be highly homogenous(although many social scientists question this assumption), English isnowadays spoken as a first language or bilingually in many countries withcultures that are quite different from the UK or (Anglo-Saxon) NorthAmerica. Do all these different people and cultures share the same, or asimilar world-view?

Overall, the biggest problem with this book is that it is short onsubstance. It contains no new data, and crucially, no data at all thatwould serve to establish the purported relationship between language andculture/thought. The analysis of the language data is in many respects onlycursory and conspicuously biased towards the desired conclusion. On theother hand, I find the topic quite inspiring in the witty way it is exposedby the author. Even if the analysis and the results may not be convincing,a book like this, which manages to raise interesting research questions inan interesting manner, can justly be called a success.